BASILICI. - A great Byzantine legal compilation, promulgated in Greek under the emperor Leo VI the Wise (886-911), with the title Collection of the entire legislation in 60 books (Παράλληλος συναγωγὴ καὶ σύνταξις ἐν ὅλοις βιβλίοις ἐξήκοντα πάσης νομοθεσίας).
This work was conceived and brought to completion as a repurgatio, that is, a correction, updating and recasting, of the entire legislative work of Justinian (v.) and of the later legislation down to the emperor Leo VI (in particular, account was also taken of the Ecloga of Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus, although not explicitly). This repurgatio of the ancient sources was already planned and in part carried out at the time of Basil I (867-86), as is indicated by hints in two passages, one in the preface of the Prochiron, the other in the proem of the Epanagoge. As we can ascertain by means of the text of the B. that has come down to us, the material given by the earlier legislation, with everything removed that was not, or did not seem, suited to the times and the needs of the age of Basil I and Leo VI, was recast and arranged in 60 books, in turn divided into titles (within the same title are gathered the matters concerning one and the same legal institution: de nuptiis, de legatis, de tutoribus, etc.) provided with a rubric and divided into capitula and themata. In the capitula the passages taken from the sources follow one another in the order they had in them. As for the constitution of the Greek text of the B., the compilers used for this purpose the translations, paraphrases, elaborations and school works produced by the teachers of law of the 6th-7th centuries; this for the Latin Justinianic sources; whereas for the Novels and the later legislation the original Greek text was mostly used, or it was somewhat reworked in some cases.
The text of the B. in several codices is provided with an apparatus of scholia, which for the most part are fragments of commentaries and paraphrases on the text of the Corpus Iuris going back to the 6th and early 7th centuries; to them were sometimes added passages drawn from works of legal writers of the 10th-12th centuries. In character and arrangement, this system of scholia finds a complete analogy in the so-called Catena of Byzantine theological literature. As for the substitution of such Catena for the B., it is today an accepted opinion that this apparatus was added to the text later, in all probability in the 10th century, and subsequently, in the 12th-13th centuries, extracts of commentaries by jurists of the 10th-12th centuries were added. Ecclesiastical matters are treated mainly in book I, tit. 1 (on the Trinity and the Catholic faith), in book III, tit. 1-4; book IV; book V, tit. 1-3 (matters of organization and administration of the Church and ecclesiastical private law); book LX, tit. 54, 20 ff. (penalties for infractions of the laws of the Church and against heretics). All these norms are inspired by criteria of a rigid defense of the dogma and discipline of the Church.
The B. as they exist today, owing to vast lacunae in the current state of the manuscript tradition, are not complete, not even in the most recent edition of G. E. Heimbach (6 vols., Leipzig 1833-70) with the supplements of Zachariae von Lingenthal (ibid. 1846) and of C. Ferrini and G. Mercati (ibid. 1897).
For this reason, in order to gain an idea of the parts of the B. that are lost or still lying hidden in manuscripts, the two summaries of the entire work that we recall here are noteworthy: the Synopsis Basilicarum maior of the 10th century (ed. Zachariae von Lingenthal, Ius Graeco-Romanum, vol. VI) and even more the Tipocito of the end of the 11th century, of which so far books I-XII, XIII-XVIII and XXIV-XXXVIII have been published in vols. 25, 31 and 107 of the Studi e Testi of the Vatican Library, edited respectively by C. Ferrini and G. Mercati, by F. Dölger and by S. Hoermann and E. Seidl.